In recent years, the Internet has brought great impact to all walks of life, and the printing and packaging industry is no exception.

According to market research data, the impact of the Internet has led to the decline of profits in many industry segments. However, some industries related to packaging, such as label printing, folding carton printing, flexible packaging printing and corrugated carton printing, have suffered relatively little negative impact, and their market development shows an upward trend.

Packaging is growing rapidly and shows no signs of slowing down. The institute estimates that digital printing packaging was valued at $6.6 billion in 2013. That figure is expected to double to $14.4 billion by 2018.

Label printing took the lion's share of the digital printing market in 2013 and is expected to reach $6 billion by 2018, accounting for 89.6 percent of all digital package printing. Today, more than $2 billion of label and package printing is produced for color digital printers worldwide. Although about 95% of this value is used in the field of consumer labels, the use of folding cartons and flexible packaging is also growing rapidly in the field of digital printing. More projections show that the use of digital technology to produce packaging is expected to increase by 375% in 2018.

Traditional printing processes such as package printing, flexible printing, gravure printing and plate printing still hold an important position and have a great market demand. But as digital printing processes advance in size, speed and flexibility, their market share will diminish.

The application of digital printing in label production has been very mature, electronic photography and inkjet are gradually taking more and more market share, which is expected to reach 27% market growth rate by 2018. In the world digital packaging printing market, the western European market exceeded $920 million in 2013, among which Germany is still the largest printing market in Europe. The United States, the largest country in the printing and packaging sector, is by far the most developed digital printing market, and its market share is expected to grow to $3.38 billion by 2018.

With the continuous innovation of technology, electronic photography and inkjet printing are improving in quality and speed, which greatly challenges the advantages of offset printing, wide flexographic printing and gravure printing.

An interesting phenomenon is that traditional printer manufacturers are gradually focusing on the equipment manufacturing in the field of package printing. Many become important pillars in the field of folding carton, flexible packaging, label, corrugated board printing equipment manufacturing.

'multimillion-dollar' high-end printing presses redefine the role of digital printing in the packaging industry Internationally, the number of such packaging printing machines is growing, and these devices are designed to be used in areas such as folding cartons and flexible packaging, where larger images are printed on larger paper sizes. In addition, the high-end digital printing presses that have been developed, which are printed in full color directly onto corrugated cardboard, and on various forms of packaging such as cans and bottles, realize these technologies with color digital printing machines that cost between $1 million and $4 million.

The packaging market now has more digital options than ever before, but it also means greater competition and threat to traditional packaging printing presses. Compared with traditional printing machines, the output speed and production efficiency of digital printing machines have been greatly increased.

Printer manufacturers have adopted industrial technologies other than traditional printing, such as the beverage industry with a variety of packaging automation options.

The introduction of the "million dollar" digital packaging printing press will bring fundamental changes to the market. Compared with the digital label printing press, the size is smaller but the growth rate can be expected. To justify the higher costs, these machines will produce far more than the amount of packaging printing that can be done by digital label printing machines for short-term production.

These printers are designed for printing bottles and corrugated cardboard boxes. The machines will also attract new companies with revenues of more than $10 million that are looking for packaging production-grade digital printing equipment. Higher performance digital printers are expected to enter the market at a faster rate.